Deroy Murdock: Where has pride gone?

June 15, 2013

HOUSTON — I recently toured the Johnson Space Center here, while vacationing with my retired, itinerant, sainted parents. The most striking thing at NASA’s legendary facility is a Saturn V rocket. It lies within a giant hangar, beneath incredibly bright lights. It is humongous and breathtaking.

In large red letters, the words UNITED STATES appear proudly along the vehicle’s length. It brought tears to my eyes. I thought: This is what America did, back when America did things.

Today, America has that no-can-do spirit.

The U.S. now wheezes beneath the crushing weight of lawsuits, environmental impact reports, diversity consultants, a $17 trillion national debt, entitlement proliferation, lethargic economic growth, the lowest labor-participation rate since 1979, relentless Twitter distractions, and the mind-dissolving effects of Kardashianization.

When another Saturn V sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon in July 1969, America was a serious country. Forty-four summers hence, not so much.

U.S. astronauts headed for the International Space Station now must hitchhike there on Russia’s rockets. Fare: $70.6 million each.

Beyond America’s downshift in space, innovation seems stuck in a lower gear. When did a new invention make you slap your head in astonishment — as was routine for decades. Smartphones do grow smarter. But aside from that …

Yes, the Saturn V was a product of big government — but not as big then as today. When Armstrong took “one small step for a man,” Washington, D.C., spent 19.3 percent of GDP. By 2011: 24.5 percent.

Besides, big government used the Saturn V to accomplish “one giant leap for mankind,” as Armstrong declared. Here on Earth, that mission catapulted America well ahead of the Marxist Soviet Union.

Compare that to big government today: $787 billion squandered on a stimulus that stimulated nothing; green jobs that — at best — cost $575,000 each, and a throbbing entitlement state that expands as poverty grows. On a smaller but also irritating scale, conference-going IRS employees have occupied $3,500-per-night hotel rooms. The tax agency also spent $17,000 so “motivational artist” Erik Wahl could paint Michael Jordan and Bono.

Thanks to the high stakes of the Cold War, the clench-jawed relentlessness of the Greatest Generation, or perhaps some other factor(s), America once exuded gravity. That largely has floated away.

As common sense evaporates, for instance, Petrona Smith told her Bronx Spanish students that “black” in that language is negro. Some took offense, and she got fired. Now, she is suing for damages.

Tracey Hannema, a Manhattan dyslexic, is suing for 50 percent more time, so she can take a medical-school admissions test in the quiet, distraction-free environment where she says she could boost her score. Will she also demand such tranquility in a hospital emergency room?

Instead of an Apollo-style celebration of achievement and individual excellence, standards slide. NBC News recently profiled Oregon’s South Medford High School and its 21 valedictorians. At Alabama’s Enterprise High, 34 students are “first in their class.”

It’s important not to over-romanticize this picture. The best and the brightest who built the Saturn V also authored the Food Stamp program that burgeons today. Medicaid barely wobbles along, 48 years after its creation. And Washington shipped some 2.6 million GIs to Vietnam. Some 58,000 returned in body bags.

Still, there is something truly inspiring even now about the words with which President John F. Kennedy launched the Apollo program in September 1962: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Imagine a president of the United States challenging the American people this way. These days, in a nation perpetually on break, it would seem almost rude.